


the old men of the wandering mountain

by Contra



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, yet another apocalypse fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:28:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22411030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Contra/pseuds/Contra
Summary: erik blows up a disintegration gun. (neverending story inspired)
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	the old men of the wandering mountain

**Author's Note:**

> inspiration by michael ende's the neverending story, though not exactly an au.

the two of you meet at the end of the world so often, it kind of starts to feel like home.

so there he is, after yet another possible apocalypse, which you thwarted, as is your heroic duty, and he looks old and frail and still so much like the man you dragged out of the water fifty years ago, except it's almost sixty years now, actually, and you're starting to lose track.

the pieces of the new special reactor he was trying to seize from the government are still lying around him, you came too late to stop its destruction, but it didn't fall into anyone's hand, so you count that as a victory.

he looks at you with his bright, gentle eyes and there is something in them that almost looks like defeat.

  
except the world keeps falling apart. you don't know what it is, and hank doesn't know it, and all the various shady government agencies say they don't know it, and from what they can find out, china and russia don't either.

everyone is scared.

_call him_ , hank tells you, in that urgent ultima-ratio tone that makes a part of you smile, as if you haven't called erik so often for these kind of things. it's not that you stop caring, exactly, but after decades of this, it just gets harder and harder to focus. when isn't the world ending these days?

but radiation levels are rising and something strange is going on with the electricity and there is unexplainable seismic activity in the oceans and your spine aches, it hasn't ached like this for so long. it's as good an excuse to call erik as any. 

there are surgeries, you know, where they put little metal screws inside your bones that might make them hurt less. _it doesn't-_ your doctors had scrambled, the first time they'd proposed this, after you'd looked at them with quiet amusement, _we could try it with ceramics or something else maybe. it hasn't been tested but obviously if metal-_

you never told them that technically, erik can control your blood. you're surprised enough as it is that he, with his penchant for slamming buildings and ships and tank divisions, has managed to keep some particular subtleties of his power for himself.

  
you're pretty sure if they put metal inside of you, erik would tend it, would save it, would bind your bones together more capably than any medicine could. maybe this is what you are afraid of. you have spent so many nights reaching out to the blankness of his mind under the helmet. not to change him, the only thing you would have offered would have been comfort, but you always knew he would not let you get that far.

  
so you reached just for the sake of reaching. 

this is a lie, of course.

so you tell him, i missed you, the world is still ending, that reactor you blew up, what was in it? also my back is killing me.

you have fine-tuned yourself so well to the shape of his absence that you can feel him smile. it's like a photo negative, you just have feel everywhere where he isn't, and then invert it to find him. if he gets your blood, you think it's only fair that you get to have this.

 _i could make you a new wheelchair_ , he answers, _that thing you have is no good for you anyway_ -

erik, you say. the entire world.

he is silent for a moment. maybe he has forgotten it. maybe he ended the world and forgot it. he's an old man now, too.

 _ask your government_ , he answers finally. he didn't get the whole picture, only particles, not a reactor but a weapon, _they'd have used it against mutants_ , and you sigh because of course your friends at the cia and nsa didn't mention that part. but you've been in this game for long enough that some part of you suspected.

 _let me help you_ , he says. _with your back_.

they're called, and this is pretty self-explanatory, disintegration particles. _professor, you must understand, lehnsherr and his goons were a threat._

and yes you've heard this before, national security and nuclear deterrence and that one time an entire timeline collapsed.

you think about what it started as, after the war, how it felt to see erik rebuild himself out of the scrap metal barbed wire pieces the nazis left over, how you still thought this could be done for the entire world, before you saw what it had turned him into. you don't tell them, i have built my entire life inside of this grief. you don't tell them, _we_ -

they would not listen anyway.

disintegration particles and now the atmosphere is chock-full of them, they are something like the opposite to matter (anti-matter? you ask hank, but he shakes his head and launches into a deeply mathematical exposition, something about quark spins and rotating microstrings until the only words you understand are " _ifs_ " and " _onlys_ "). you get the bigger principle though. disintegration particles relate to matter and anti-matter in the way that tired old bonmot says the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

literally, it's indifference that's eating up the world.

disintegration particles don't care what they devour. sometimes it's atmospheral carbon dioxide, which actually slows down climate change for a while. other times it's a chunk of canada that's roughly the size of new hampshire.

_oh_ , the various government agencies say as they stand by the edges of the hole that is left over, or at least as close as they dare. you're here and some un guys are here and he's here, too, because apparently threats and enemies don't matter when the world is ending. it has been ending, though, for so many years.

you stare at the endless spot of nothingness that the mountain range has turned into, like someone just copy-pasted a piece of perfect space.

you have seen space, the eternity of it.

this is, you cannot help yourself thinking over and over, what they wanted to turn erik into.

they are explaining things in panicked voices and run tests and let mutants try their power on it, but you just look at them. this is what they wanted to turn erik into.

you remember what it felt like, erik - helpless, scrambling, _empty -_ after the war.

_maybe it will run out at some point?_ somebody asks, like you are, you are running out of patience. you are so calm you cannot move. _i mean, it was supposed to only kill like, three people, right?_

the various government agencies lie and say yes, even though it was meant for far more than three people, but also less than the entire world. _but the disintegration weapon was a highly sophisticated piece of technology that was able to focus the particles-_

 _it's like a giant can of deodorant_ , one of the cia guys interrupts the scientists futilely trying to run damage control. _they were basically compressed, and now they blew up._

 _at least_ , erik's smile is ironic but not bitter, this is the first thing he has said in your presence today, _at least now they are free_.

your spine might collapse, you think, under all this weight. even his joy is so heavy - and he doesn't even have that.

this is what they wanted to _do to you_ , you are thinking, and he's wearing the helmet so there is no chance at telepathic communication, but you're pretty sure your anger, your shock, your hurt can be seen on your face.

for sixty years, and this too he must know, and this is what hurts you most, you have been loving him along the edges of negative space.

you can feel your blood boil, in a way that is filled with something like sympathy. you can feel it coil around your spine in unnatural ways that keep you standing upright.

they ask you if you can feel it, if there is any sort of consciousness within the shapeless darkness that to everyone's horror, is slowly expanding.

there isn't, you say.

but of course you can feel it. in a terrifying way, it feels almost like home.

so this is the way the world will end, nobody says it. you think about erik after the war. this is the way the world has ended, you think, in 1944 and in 1961 and in-  
but both of you are still here.

_maybe a name_ , erik says and you look up at him, surprised, and he asks you if you've read the neverending story. _that's how they beat it in the book, right?_  
you have read it, because you are a lonely old school teacher in a wheelchair, but it surprises you that somewhere between the revenge and the world domination, he must have found the time to read children's books.  
he never even had a childhood.  
erik, you say. over and over again. his whole life - empty spaces.

so things disappear, quietly. disintegrate.

all mountains stop being mountains over night. there are no fish left in the sea. 

he comes over and sets up the chessboard, _who knows_ , he jokes in a tone that is completely humorless, _how long until there are no chessboards left._

you play for the rest of forever.

there is a roof over your head until there isn't. you look up at the sky and you see only vast, empty expanses. _this is where we've always been_ , he marvels, completely unperturbed at the fact that there is no atmosphere left, you realize that it's him, desperately, nonsensically, that is keeping you breathing, might have done for some time, you have no idea how he does it, maybe force the oxygen directly into your blood stream, but you notice from the sadness in his eyes that he won't be able to do it for much longer.

please take of the helmet, you try to say, but there isn't any air left in your lungs, it used to be only you but now it's all around me, it's everywhere and it's completely empty, please take off the helmet, i am so alone.

he understands you.

and this is how it happens for the two of you, at the end of a world that died to kill him, you can feel the familiar bright light of his mind against yours and in a few million light-years distance there are small glittering stars. _this is where we've always been,_ and your back stops hurting for the first time in a long time. you don't think of this as leaving. you are coming home.


End file.
